Micah 5:2-5a

O LITTLE TOWN OF BETHLEHEM

Anyone who grew up in the English-speaking world, and was in church regularly, almost certainly heard the word “Bethlehem” before s/he could say or understand it, because of Phillips Brooks’ beloved Christmas Carol, “O Little Town of Bethlehem.” In 1865, Brooks, then rector of the Church of the Holy Trinity Episcopal Church in Philadelphia, traveled to Palestine, a long-neglected province of the Ottoman Empire. On Christmas Eve, he made the five-mile trip from Jerusalem to Bethlehem, on horseback; he wrote, “Before dark we rode out of town to the field where they say the shepherds saw the star [sic]. It is a fenced piece of ground with a cave in it, in which, strangely enough, they put the shepherds. . .. Somewhere in those fields we rode through, the shepherds must have been. As we passed, the shepherds were still ‘keeping watch over their flocks,’ or leading them home to fold.” In Bethlehem, Brooks and his company attended the Christmas Eve service in the Church of the Nativity, which went from 10:00 p.m. to 3:00 a.m. The countryside, the church, and the service impressed him deeply.

As young and not-long-married graduate students in Jerusalem, my wife Charlotte and I observed Christmas Eve, 1972, in Bethlehem. We had been before to “cave of the shepherds”; we had dear Arab Christian friends on Milk Grotto Street. Still, for us, as for Brooks a century earlier, the peaceful sights and sounds of Bethlehem that night, including midnight worship in the ancient Church of the Nativity, became life-time memories. (We grieve that international politics now has made Bethlehem – all of it – the world’s largest prison. We pray, too, for the soon return of its preeminent Son, to be for Bethlehem that Shalom Micah predicted here.)

Back to Brooks: Three years later, wanting a new Christmas song for the children of his church, he drew on his Bethlehem Christmas Eve experience and wrote – one almost could say, without pause – the words that have become a staple of the Advent/Christmas season:

O little town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie;

above thy deep and dreamless sleep the silent stars go by.

Most publications of the carol include four of Phillips’ original five stanzas. The first phrase, “O little town of Bethlehem,” is a rendering of the first words of Micah 5:2 [5:1, Heb.], “But as for you, Bethlehem Ephratah, [though] little to be [reckoned] among the clans of Judah, . . .” (author’s translation). Micah was from Moresheth-Gath, a district town near the western edge of the Judean Shephelah (“lowlands”), about fifteen miles southwest of Bethlehem. He would have known Bethlehem as the birthplace of David, ancient Israel’s greatest king, but not for much else. In Micah’s day, as in Brooks’, Bethlehem was an insignificant village, a hamlet.

But Micah’s point in these verses is that Bethlehem’s status would change because of another birth, a birth to come in the indefinite future. The verse continues, “From you will he come out for me to be [the] one who rules in [over] Israel, and his goings out will be from of old, from ancient days.” From the place so small as not to matter would come one from, and of, the ages, the One who would make all the difference in and for the ages, going forward.

Most of us love stories of reversal – in sports, the underdog winning; in life, the coming out to peace and flourishing of those no one may have expected even to survive. Here, Micah predicted Bethlehem’s survival and flourishing; by extension, this would include all Israel and, ultimately, humankind itself. Micah saw that all would hinge on this One: “From you, he shall come out for me to be the Ruler in Israel.” Bethlehem had produced David, Israel’s greatest king to Micah’s day; from Bethlehem also would come David’s greater Son. (We need not insist Micah himself thought so specifically as “David’s greater Son”; that is an insight from hindsight.) No word in verse 2 yet makes this a nativity story; that becomes clearer in verse 3, “. . . until the time she who [shall be] in labor shall give birth.” Putting this together with “Bethlehem,” the religious leaders in Herod’s Jerusalem directed the Magi there 700 years later (Matt 2:6).

“He shall stand and pasture [his flock].” Everyone in the ancient Near East would have recognized the image (here, a metaphor) of the shepherd standing watch over his/her flock. Furthermore, Israel’s God, some of the national and personal gods of Israel’s neighbors, and even kings as God’s (or the gods’) human representatives and agents, regularly were described and pictured as “shepherds” of their people. (The Old Babylonian King Hammurabi of the famous Code is a well-known example.) An implicit support for taking this image here in Micah as foreshadowing Jesus is his extended discussion of himself as the good Shepherd in John 10.

The Judean Wilderness lay on Bethlehem’s eastern doorstep. Beyond Bethlehem’s grainfields – which extended two miles or so below and beyond the town to the east – the western portion of the wilderness was a transitional zone between the agricultural lands of permanent habitation and the true desert of the eastern Wilderness sloping down toward the Dead Sea shoreline. Supporting pasturage during the winter rainy season and into mid-spring, this transitional steppe-land also comprises the eastern approaches to Jerusalem and the other major towns of the Israelite highlands. In the winter-spring grazing season, the young David would have been a familiar sight leading his flock out of Bethlehem in the morning, back into town as dusk approached. If any Bethlehemites heard (or later read) Micah’s idyllic vision here, we may imagine they took comfort that another like their David was still to come.

“And they shall live secure, for now he shall be great to the ends of the earth” (v. 4b, NRSV). Micah brings the shepherd imagery to a climax; under the great shepherd’s watchful care, no one would dare attack the flock while they remained close to him. Two or three years ago in this space, I made the following observations on Psalm 23:2 (If you remember, thank you!); they seem appropriate here, also, as we consider this shepherd of Micah’s vision:

Imaging this metaphorically for the human sheep of Yahweh’s flock, and attempting to express the nuances of ravats [lie down, or crouch], an expansive paraphrase could read, “Yahweh causes me to lie down satisfied and secure, relaxed, at ease in the comfort and security of Yahweh’s wise, devoted, and constant provision – physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually confident that, as Yahweh’s faithfulness has not failed in the past, it will not fail in the future.” In the ne’ot, the pasture-lands, the shepherd’s physical presence is important to this state of ease in the sheep. As Jesus prepared to leave, he taught his inner circle of followers that our sure knowledge of the Shepherd’s presence would be vouchsafed neither through our physical senses nor our emotional feelings, but through the Holy Spirit’s abiding presence and ministration (John 14).

I have both driven and hiked the ne’ot of the Judean Wilderness east of Jerusalem and Bethlehem. I know firsthand that the unprepared novice can perish there if something goes wrong even a little, and help is not available. The shepherd [of Psalm 23, and of Micah 5:4] knows the paths into and around the ne’ot, the pastureland and the watering places, and the ways out. Only in the shepherd’s care can the sheep traverse these green pastures and, having grazed to satiation, lie down to rest in safety (Micah’s “live securely”). We need not wonder at the universal appeal of the image of God as “my Shepherd.”

Micah concluded this short predictive pericope with the declaration, “And he shall be the one of peace” (5:5a, NRSV). This is not “wrong,” but the Hebrew is more direct, “And this one shall be peace.” The Ruler and Shepherd who was to come out of Bethlehem would not merely possess peace, or only bring peace. He would be, is, shall be peace. To the church at Ephesus, speaking of this one – whom Christians by then knew was Jesus – Paul wrote, “He is our peace” (Eph 2:14). That is reason enough to celebrate in this, and every, Advent/Christmas season.